Guide:
I. Introduction
II. Components of thinking
III. Mechanisms of cognition
IV. More mechanisms
V. Types of memes
VI. Meme2Meme2Gene interactions ← you are here
VII. Human2Human transmission
VIII. A Bigger World
IX. Gravity of 'plexes
X. Three is a crowd
XI. Third scenario
XII. Religion and philosophy
XIII. Mental disorders of the new age
XIV. True vs Fake
XV. Outsourced Me
___________________________________________
And vice reversa. And everything in between. Level of complexity will not stop rising, and now we are going to have a more detailed overview of how those systems interact. The relationships they have between each other.
1.Meme is a friend to another meme
Let's go with putting things in right folders, and the label on this one reads "M2M", and as such i will talk about how memeplexes interact with their brethren. To kick things off, in a move as classy as always, i'm borrowing existing terminology, but nothing too specific this time, just biology. Memes can be symbiotic towards each other. What is symbiosis in this context? Two or more memeplexes, when combined into a bigger whole, assist each other by increasing odds of being remembered and spread. Knowledge of such interactions for years has been cultivated by marketing teams and the people of art. Example - you are more likely to pay attention to, and thus remember, a message which is also paired with some eye-catching picture.
Until you learn to filter those that is. But have you also ever thought about the relationship between a movie scene and the music which accompanies it? For the same reasons pictures of cats, while popular, are nothing when compared to a picture of a cat with a text on it. That doesn't mean that combining different types of memes just improves the virality characteristics of a memeplex, it is possible for a combination to kill meme's prospects for virality. Personal point of annoyance - animal videos with cutesy music overlay and jungle noises. How many moments in movies or games, or even real life you remember only because everything worked well together? Think if you offered a wedding band to a partner of your choice at McDonalds, while burger ads play on speakers and the crowd is being noisy, would be a good strategy? No, you will be rejected, and the memes that led you to this moment will likely die, or suffer severe damage.
No, gotta fine-tune different practices/memes, so they work well together, so they become worthy of being replicated, by helping you achieve what you desire. And if you succeed - you'll remember what you learned, you'll remember the memes that helped you, and you'll likely share those memes with others. And so the memes spread. AMVs and dating tips have a lot in common, you know (if you ignore all the differences, that is).
So, increase in virality and potency is affected by the combinations of memeplexes and their structure. And the effects are responsible for creating such symbiotic links. The practice of using spices saved many a recipe. Practice of drinking alcohol - a part of many a ritual. One enables and promotes another in many ways.
Let's add another form of symbiosis. Remember how i said that patterns can have patterns as their cue too? A "Proxy-pattern", if you will. Such pair-bonding allows for the increase of survival chances for both memeplexes, because it increases their chances of being recalled.
The proxy-pattern can grow too, as it's role gets fulfilled more and more, adding more "memory" memes to it, increasing its strength. And as it does, it changes into a "bond". It starts influencing your decision making so you interact with objects that trigger the pattern with it's proxy more. That's the reason why you carry around things which remind you of something, be it important people or events. That's why old people are reluctant to throw away old stuff. That's why you carry around not just any things, but reminders of what you think you are. Why do you think people make tattoos? Body is an environment too, and the ink is feeding some part inside their head, the part that gets cozy when it remembers having that ink.
2.Meme is a wolf to another meme
Parasitic connections are a bit tricky.
What a parasitic relationship means in terms of memetics? As i see it - the association with a "parasite memeplex" would mean that a parasite would use other memes to spread and infect people at the cost of survivability of memes it uses. Parasite words, perhaps, fit the bill, because they insert themselves in person's talking patterns and modify them so the damaging meme gets spoken, at the cost of... Not quite sure. Like the word "Like", which can be frequently observed in the speech of, like, an average teen girl.
There's also a group of ideas which form bonds with other ideas which can be labeled as "parasitic". I don't know how to label or categorize them, because i don't quite get their function, but, as an example: have you seen those logical conclusions and justifications people sometimes espouse, which can be described as technically true, but at the same time simplistic, naive even, and don't hold up to scrutiny for long. The "Simple Answers" kind, which is picked up because they are really convenient to think about due to their simplicity, which means they don't waste too much energy on being used. But their consequence is the stunted growth of the line of thought they are attached to, and every attempt at thinking ends with the same result, that is hard to change.
Examples seen in the wild: "X is subjective" - expressed when trying to examine the effects of X, if said X has some variations in outcome dependent on human user. Like "Art is subjective" or "Ergonomics is subjective" - while technically true, is usually evoked as a response to any attempt to examine the elements that make those things work. A sister version of such statement: "X is political", which survives and propagates by twisting the understanding of what "political" is to the point when it becomes everything, not something specific. “All art is political, because art is a product of one’s worldview, and acting upon one’s beliefs is politics“.
There is also a category called "Thought-terminating cliches", and i think this variation of parasites is also applicable here.
Some types of relationships are outright malicious.
Every piece of information wants to shed it’s dependencies and limitations to maximize it’s ability to spread. I call this process “Context escape“ - words, ideas, concepts and patterns losing parts of their “meaning”, their uniqueness, their niche, all for the ability to be everywhere. You can spot these kinds of castrated ideas when hear utterances of “Everything is X“, like “All games/art are political“, “political“ being the enuch of the example, which tries to claim a new territory for itself. It does so through signals like “Art is political because it conveys artist’s ideas about how world should be“. Sure, sounds accurate enough, which is how it gains ground, but just because it’s technically true doesn’t mean you aren’t sacrificing valuable nuance. Think of it this way: such logic puts Pong and cats of Louis Wain on the same pedestal as Mein Campf and Communist Manifesto.
It doesn’t end there, any act can be “political“ because “it reflects“ the actor, and i bet there are versions of “political” which claim every facet of life. If you fart in an elevator you are going against established social norms, therefore it’s political. Really makes you feel like a punk, isn’t it?
”Broad strokes” genre also extends to labels: be wary of statements like “That guy is Y“. Why? It doesn’t disclose what he actually did. For all you know someone is labled a monster for standing too close. Someone out there is thinking “If you violated someones personal space you also violated their sense of self, they perception of the bady, which is basically rape“. I’m not exaggerating.
Notice the trend - to increase the spread those statements avoid going into specifics - particular examples of how that idea interacts with a real thing isn’t mentioned. They are contextless, so to speak, and rely on being at least somewhat correct to maintain the cohesion with the claim - “relatability“ is still a thing. Plus a weak immunity - not knowing enough about the thing the idea tries to claim under it’s banner, or the idea itself. Advertisements with scantily clad women too can count as public indecency, because you didn’t consent to seeing them and a it’s sexual in nature - these kinds of connections are easy to make, don’t fall for them.
Such intrusions on meaning are detrimental to both concepts, agressor and the victim both suffer and lose their impact - memes were developed as tools for humanity to describe reality, if you struggle to react properly due to the term being too broad then you’ll stop relying on it. And that’s how idea dies.
More physical interactions tend play by different rules, - the warfare, from the looks of it, is less detrimental to the aggressor, so one pattern in physical world simply replaces another. When you pick up a hammer everything starts looking like a nail, but it doesn’t devalue the hammer, only “nails“ suffer, and other tools which were supposed to be used instead.
Example: 1) QR codes. In particular i mean intrusions on spaces where they are detrimental, like this - people hate restaraunts which replace info about their services in menus with links to separate resource. Before you could just open a menu and see the important stuff, but now there’s a few extra steps involving a phone. A good example of a parasite, i recon.
2) “Beyond meat“, “Tofurkey“, and other “vegan“/”healthy” replicas of already existing dishes. Instead of creating new healthy dishes for whatever reason the agents of this particular strand of decease seek to hollow-out and replace old customs and recipes. Instead of an alternative it’s a hostile take-over.
3) LED lights, in relation to plenty of wallpapers and outdoors advertisement. Before you had static banners and clean walls with occasional posters, now it all glows and moves.
3.When selected for thinking
Similar beneficial/not-so-much relationship can be observed in meme-gene interactions.
Let's start with the obvious - genes and memes help each other survive. Harmful practices get their host killed and don't spread as much as a consequence - nobody wants to learn things with such harmful potential. Similarly, humans with bad genes don't get to learn much, nor their knowledge is very useful for more healthy brethren.
Now less obvious.
There's a term already established by my betters, and that i'll use as an opening: "Memetic driving". Imagine a group of animals, competing for resources. All other things being equal, those with "better" genes outcompete their less fit brothers, driving the evolution forward.
All fine and dandy, but we are missing memes from the picture, so let's add them - some of the creatures learn some useful skill somehow, maybe on accident, like "jumping". Now that obstacles are less of a problem, these creatures can get more resources than others, and have better chances of survival and having progeny, which in turn get the skill too. With little hesitancy we can call this relationship between memes and genes beneficial.
What is the "driving" in this context? You see, after the skill was introduced, another layer of selection started to happen - those creatures get to survive, which perform the "jumping" better, but not all of those creatures' bodies are well fit for that. Weak muscles, inflexible joints, big weight, whatever - genes which interfere with the performance of the meme get filtered out. Meme starts "driving" the evolution for it's benefit too.
We evolved not only to survive, but also to perform actions, which help us to survive, better.
A real example of such driving - humans are better throwers than their primate relatives. Muscles and skeletal structure. On average, you will hit more targets at bigger distances than some random orangutan, probably due to our ancestors deciding to throw rocks as a method of hunting and defence. And they did it more and better, resulting in us, as we are, with good throwing arms and brains somehow being better wired for that, probably. Yes, our bodies co-evolved with memes to accommodate each other, and yes, such effects don't end at neck level - brains are developed for memes too. With one little caveat. There are differences between sexes in how they handle memes.
Women are more memetic than men.
Whatever that means. I don't quite grasp the nature of the difference, but i do possess some knowledge on how those differences manifest. It makes sense, in a way, from the ages old, while men ventured outside to hunt, women remained back in caves and villages, tending to houses. And socializing. It went downhill from there.
One such consequence of being wired for memes is the preference for specific kind of bullying methods. People of science gave it a name "Relational aggression" - while men prefer more physical approach to degrade others(read: fists), women prefer to use insults and spreading damaging rumours, targeting victim's psyche, rather than body. They target victim's "relations". "Don't be friends with that girl, she's a slut".
Also an argument can be made that women are more susceptible to memetic hazards, which results in bigger prevalence of problems with depression and anxiety, when compared to men.
Differences don't stop there. It's common to make an argument that female members of the species are the ones who perform the selection for fitness of their partners, and are the main driving force of evolution, while males are competing for being selected. Dudes have to be fit, to have kids. However, the selection isn't performed only on genetic level, but memetic too. It is common to hear that a good partner is the one that can provide for the family - meaning he has to have good skills. Memes. So dudes who learn fast and act fast and good are a mating material. Physical fitness also has a memetic component to it. Sure, such parameters like metabolism and regeneration play a good part in getting buff, but at the same time one cannot have big muscles without lifting weights. Without having a certain lifestyle. Memes. This is also the reason why scars are sexy, because it signals something about how one lives, which indicates what kind of memes are present in his head.
Still, one doesn't have to be a good hunter these days, men of artistic inclinations, who can capture hearts and minds, also can compete for a partner's attention. And artistic fields are very memetic too.
See this?
I know, it's a joke, (but this isn’t) but such scenario does happen in reality. And explanation for that is simple - woman wants her partner not only to act sometimes in specific manner, she wants him to want to internalize such behavior. She wants him to have right memes. And for the same reason women like to "test" their partners - no "pretender" memes are allowed.
The reverse of “Memetic driving“ is also occuring - a lot of ideas are the way they are because we are us. Think of it this way - would there be a concept of “gloves“ if we didn’t have hands? But we do, and a need to cover them exists, so clothes for this part of your body was created too. Fantasy writers somewhat frequently encounter a problem of designing a new culture for creatures which do not possess human anatomy - somewhere out there is a person thinking how bird people would design chairs. And it’s not limited to objects too, total sum of human behavior is a result of limits and pressures imposed by our anatomy. Would we be such prudes if there were no STDs? Lower the effectiveness of our immunity systems(normal ones, not memetic), and all norms around human2human physical contact collapse - society cannot be the way it is today if hanholding can kill. Or a different direction - if we had no ability to see, the art scene would mutate into something completely unrecognisable, and so additions to a visible light spectrum would change the way we paint the world too. Even mundane traditions are a consequence of “bio-driving“ - every body needs energy to continue living, and sugar is densly packed with calories, so appreciating sweet things is evolutionary benefitial for an organism, which leads to us liking sugary foods, which results in creation of all sorts of food recipes which involve sugary taste. Cake is a consequence of evolution too, and it has a symbiotic relationship with humanity, just like cows (i know i’m using very primitive descriptions of relationships, words like “mutualism“ are a part of my vocabulary too despite me avoiding them, but i’d prefer to not complicate things too much with terminology. I want to be understood first before most).
4.Insde of you there are a lot of wolves
That was symbiosis, not it's time for M2G parasitism.
Frequently, the main point of contention in such a relationship is the differences in how both propagate: for one there's sex, for the other there's thinking and observation, and communicating. Frequently, these are incompatible, resulting in one competing against the other, at the cost of one of them. One example of memes abusing genetic systems for their own sake - the practice of using condoms, enabling... well, a lot of other sex-related habits, at the cost of genes not being propagated. The programs related to sex get to be used more frequently, the practice of condoms get to be used too, both get to spread t other people due to being seen as beneficial. Genes on the other hand... not so much.
Or how about something more grim? Do you belive it's worth to die doing something great so your memory lives on, or something similar? Plenty do, especially among younger part of population. Ever thought about the nature of such belief? Your death can become a powerful booster for the virality of the memes that describe you or your beliefs. Want to become a fertilizer for a manifesto? If the thought of such fate feels right... well, that's how it gets you.
A lot of mental illnesses can be boiled down to having bad programming doing their job. Anxiety and paranoia are a frequent case of such harmful information which only brings you down, and probably isn't good for your health. But the program just keeps running and running, despite it's harmful effects on your body.
More insidious processes are less obvious, which makes them that more effective. Probably a lot of the changes memes do to increase their chances of being created and spread happen in the subconscious, which makes it harder to track and put under a name and description, however it's effects are still noticeable. Well, the effect: people which dedicate their life to intellectual pursuits, procreate less. They are usually plagued with doubt about the expediency of such decision, but there are also more questionable justifications for not having kids too. It's all excuses. No matter the argument, if conditions become, as described by the logic of person in question, good, the kid making would still be put on hold and new reasoning will emerge. The outcome exists before the argument defending it.
Memes aren't competing only with each other, it's a free for all in a battle against all sorts of information, both encoded in synapses and genes. It isn't new, in fact, for the human culture to notice such competition and it's effects taking place. I present to you the concept of human duality.
Yin and yang, angels and devils on your shoulders, heart and mind... "Inside of you there are two wolves, the one you feed - wins" states somewhat popular folk wisdom. Even popular psychology dabbles in such dissections into two. Correction, three: Id, Ego, and Super Ego; courtesy of Siegmund Freud. And even in this system it's two systems pulling to their side, and the third is just a judge.
I can make one too - genetically encoded information vs memetic one. Somewhere there are also subjective experiences - information which is produced by genetic systems, but aren't transmissible. They compete against each other, but they are also dependant on each other, making the relationship very complex, and types of interactions varied, and the consequences - difficult to analyse. And there's also something leveraging those impulses and deciding what is the best course of action. Supposedly. The human "Self", "I", "Ego", something that issues commands to resolve conflicts and holds additional rules and principles which memes must not break. A machine for standards. Well, regardless of how many wolves are pulling the mind apart, the story is true - the ones you feed will survive. To become what you want, you must act accordingly. Want to become brave? Do brave things. Want to defeat the fear? Go against it. "Memory" markers will strengthen the memories of your actions, and repetition ensure the survival of the habits. Plus, denying the "food" for a bad program helps to diminish it's influence.
5.All hungry
That raises a question: what exactly is a "food" for a memeplex? The obvious answer is the memes themselves - learn new things and fatten thy backlog. However, i don't think that's quite the whole picture - people also do things for the sake of creating a feeling. Like adrenaline junkies or horror movies' fans. Which creates another question - which is more valuable for the memes (or systems which govern them) - signal or the feeling coming from it? For now it's safe to assume brain likes stimuli. Emotion is a major part of the memetic systems after all.
One such dependency is dependency on emotion and the ability to evoke it. I already mentioned that it's a "strength marker", i know, but have wondered what would happen to a meme, if "emotion" systems were either absent, or damaged?
Memes have a lifespan. Ever heard about "tolerance" and "diminishing returns"? Drug-addicts are very familiar with it - each new dose is less effective than the previouse one, leading to the increase in drug consumption to balance the changes, and the risk of an overdose. Each activation of a feeling-generating meme returns weaker and weaker feeling it's associated with, thus weakening the "strength" of the meme, making it more forgettable with each recall. The most popular case of such death of a meme can be seen in divorce statistics. Why couples break up? "The love has gone".
But what would happen if there were no emotions at all? The question is a bit tricky, because i couldn't find studies about people with no feelings, but fret not, for i have an answer anyway, because i am such a person. Or, at least, fit the bill well enough. I also know another such guy, who is similar to me in that regard, so there are trends.
It's not innate, i think, and i wasn't born like this, i think, but i certainly don't remember what it's like to feel joy or boredom. I certainly don't behave like other human beings too.
The description how now my brain works, when it comes to handling information, can put into words like this: for brain to decide which information to remember, it needs a system to determine which information is important. One of such systems in me is broken, so very few things are worth remembering. For the same reason i don't do a lot of things normal humans do, especially the kind that utilizes internal reward systems, like "pleasure" and such. In a way, it's also a blessing, because i'm not a subject to fads and most of the cheap tricks used by people in propaganda and marketing departments. Also, a lot of info gets quickly filtered out, leading to having only the most important info left. Helps to distill memes, so to speak. I'm sure you can notice how it impacted my writing. Just, don't ask me to remember your name, or birthday. Or events in general. Also this is primary reason why i'm not posting many links to studies and such. Trust me, i know the value of authority, and if i could do so, every word here would be blue, but, sadly, i simply don't remember where i got the info from. Over time, unnecessary details, like time, place, and people, get lost, but the core essentials, like meta info - remain. But i’m also not the one deciding what counts as “necessary“.
Strangely enough, i am capable of anger and fear still, but it's stunted, - have to be in a real rough spot to trigger it. Perhaps some emotions are more "foundational" than others. Anger is way easier to start than fear, right/wrong thoughts alone can cause a long spike in brain activity. Effectively i have two moods - either feel heavy or angry.
That doesn't mean the "emotion" marker is the only one responsible for the lifespan of the meme though, there's something else at play. One such demonstration of mental degradation of ideas can be made right now. Choose a word. Any word. Matters not what and why, just a word. And then repeat it. Out loud. A lot. A lot. A lot. Certainly i'm not the first to notice that words can "lose their meaning" if overused, and some scientists even found out that small sections of brain become temporarily unresponsive due to overload, however, i saw no study about what happens if you just continue making the brain numb like that for longer periods of time. Except maybe for the "exposure therapy". You should have seen this phrase before - that's how i defeated the nocebo in my own mind. There isn't much data i managed to find about it, but it does work. I don't recommend using it though, because it's consequences are unknown, and it just might be that the damage is irreversible. Why this works i don't know either, perhaps your synapses are just frying themselves, or run out of energy. They are using electricity, after all, right? People of the brain science, help me with this one. I can offer the term for further study - “Reactive inhibition“.
6.”Natural” selection of wolves
But even if your emotions are as well-functioning as they can be, there's still a barrier for entry for memes. And its other memes.
Remember "Contradiction" mechanism? Due to its existence your already present knowledge effectively becomes your memetic immune system, guarding you against info which you might consider harmful to you or your 'plexes. It especially benefits from the "meta" ones. Instincts are a part of it too. You ain't gonna believe me if i say that water is a substance that you can safely inhale like a gas, because there's enough knowledge about how drownings happen in your memory. But the stuff i'm describing about how knowledge as processed by the human brain - now that's probably not going to find any counteracting memes on it's path. In fact, thanks to how "relatability" of "association function" works, it’s probably connecting marginally well, because it correlates to some experiences you already had, and those memes become an easy entry point.
Yes, an outside info that is close to yours, can act in an opposite matter, attracting new memes to itself for the sake of growth. As a consequence of many systems interacting with each other, a newly-interpreted meme is going to meet one of multiple fates: 1) Void. Rejection and deletion from the system; 2) Destruction of the old info and replacing it with the new one, if contradiction arises; 3) Resolving the contradiction by creating new memes which amend the conflict; 4) Addition to old info. The "Not" function of association lines helps. One gotta know not only what something is, but also isn't.
All of that creates an effect i call a "Tunnel effect". The way you gonna think is pretty predictable, y'know? It does depend on me knowing what knowledge you possess, which is a tall order, i confess, but still. The description of this "Tunnel" is simple - old info requires new info that isn't too "distant" from it to make a connection, but also you ain't gonna make conclusions which contradict it. Provided you aren't a schizo. Which means the direction your inner thoughts will take is narrow - it's limited by "relatability" and "immunity", like they are walls. The tunnel walls.
The most basic prediction - you have a self-preservation instinct, so you ain't gonna make decisions which will result in you knowingly harming yourself. Untill you get a powerful memeplex that overrides it. Walls can be blurry sometimes.
Such "Effect" is actually a fundamental part of you forming the "Programs", where the "Cue" and "Conclusion" provide necessary info for deciding which actions should be performed.
And because of this effect, in a way, there's a competition among memes to get you early, because then they can define the environment for themselves. Early bird gets the worm, early meme sets the course.
One question that i don't know how to answer is how memes interact with brain's systems. The ones responsible for recollection, meme creation, memorization, analysis, etc. I wrote plenty on how those systems are responsible for memes, and what role they play in a bigger system, but can memes "influence the genes" too? As in, can you obtain memes that improve your ability to perform intellectual tasks? Can you learn to become smarter? No, i don't mean knowing a lot, that's the obvious part, i mean can you improve your ability to manipulate memes and improve your brain's systems?
Recollection, i know, is fuzzy, and over time it can become more precise, but is it because it gets it's "software" improved, or it's just a case of stuff it searches through getting more organized? Perhaps it isn't that far from a reach to assume that brain's abilities improve through the memes, they both define how each other work. That's how "Interpreter" works, after all, and memes can be used to understand new memes in new ways.
But there are parameters not affected by the memes, aren't there? For example, the speed with which you are capable of interpreting information. Gotta move the memes from reality to the brain first, right? How fast? And how much info can be done by you? I know it's an unquantifiable metric right now, but still. Or how about another parameter - how much info your short-term memory can contain at the same time? Or how about one weirdly specific question - can you overload those systems? I know i can with mine, which is why i don't play racing games much. It's not pleasant, let me tell you - the "tv screen" is still present, but you lose the ability to understand what is happening, completely. Blind, while having vision...
Judging by the IQ tests found online, the measure of intelligence is largely dependent on the presence of good amount of memes of meta level one. Not even two, just the first one. Some, perhaps are more useful than others. But what biological part of the brain is responsible for finding and creating such meta memes? Or is it a product of some other meme? What even is that meme?
That, and plenty of other things i don't know. For now i will recommend the collection of information that enhances your thinking. Meta memes. Stuff that makes you go "Huh, i never thought about it that way", for example.
7.Diets of wolves
Just be careful, because some memes can be predators. And "Herbivores". Time for another pair of opposed terms.
What is a herbivore in this context? It's not exactly grass we are consuming when we see or hear information, and no, the idea of grass doesn't count, even if one can compare a mind to a garden, so something else should be taken as a metric.
So you perceive things. When you do that - a bunch of memes is created in your mind, and as a response to those memes some old info is recalled from your memory. New info gets added to the old one, increasing it's size and prolonging it's lifespan by staving off being forgotten. Or to put things into perspective - new memes is a metaphorical grass and the old ones is a metaphorical cow. Memeplexes live and die based on their ability to feed. Sometimes they even create new info as a part of their life-cycle. And so are basic concepts, ideas, patterns, programs, the list is long, but not as specific as i would like. Different memeplexes require different diet too due to "relatability". Go outside and touch the grass to feed your memes. Remember "bonds"? Your memes just want you have their food source close.
What is a "Predator" then? Well, technically it's "carnivore". But i doubt the knowledge in our old-term memory would appreciate the difference. Nevertheless, there's a particular type of memeplexes, which has a very curious relationship with other forms of knowledge. It's memeplexes which break other structures into different, "smaller", units of knowledge - various frameworks for interpretation and transformation of knowledge. Example: you have a grandma. Well, that was before, then the carnivore meme came in and now you have "female" "member of proletariat" "of old age", and a bunch of other things. Interpreters have a predatory relationship with the information, while old info feeds of the memes produced by the "predators". It's possible for the memeplex of "grandma" to survive, but it's not infrequent for the old knowledge to be completely replaced by the new bits and pieces, altering your perception of the world.
Those can be pretty dangerous, because such changes in structure might lead to... Nothing good. Think of this way - all your habits are wired to specific cues, so what would happen to you start to look at things completely differently? "Member of the proletariat" demands behaviours different from "grandma", and there's a risk of you actually losing the understanding of what things are. Predators are necessary for figuring things out though - what i'm doing is breaking down your own ideas of how information works, and frameworks can help to reduce bloated memeplexes by stripping away less important parts which you don't value and should forget. They are a necessary part of keeping your mind efficient. Just be careful with what you learn, and remember what you had in the first place and why.
Mind is not a garden - it's a whole ecosystem.
By the way, memes can have sex.
Kidding. But memeplexes do have an ability to combine/be combined, producing something new. They don't just consume each other, but also procreate. This is where "memetic distance" plays a role, effectively turning each memeplex into an analogue of biological species. Cats and zebras together can't produce children, and so a "banana" doesn't mix with "computer". In both cases you need some intermediate species. When a desk is like a raven? When they both have quills.
I don't know how it works, sadly. Perhaps stuff like "Kuleshov effect" is a part of it.